A federal judge in a contract case has excused compliance with a discovery agreement that would have required the plaintiff to produce an estimated 65 million documents, finding it would cost too much to screen them for privilege.

“This case highlights the dangers of carelessness and inattention in e-discovery,” District Judge Dickinson Debevoise wrote in a Dec. 9 ruling. “While Plaintiff should have known better than to agree to the search terms used here, the interests of justice and basic fairness are little served by forcing Plaintiff to undertake an enormously expensive privilege review of material that is unlikely to contain non-duplicative evidence.

Without the effort and understanding of the judge in this case, the plaintiff would have been overwhelmed by the costs of complying with the e-discovery agreement.